Movie: in this exclusive Dezeen movie, Chinese architect Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio explains why he recycled material from traditional Chinese buildings to construct the Ningbo History Museum.

Completed in 2008, the Ningbo History Museum is a 30,000-square-metre building located in the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang province, China.

The three-storey museum's distinctive facade is largely composed of debris collected from the surrounding area, where traditional Chinese towns and villages were demolished to make way for new developments.

"Originally in this area there were about thirty beautiful villages and they demolished every village," Wang says in the movie, which Dezeen filmed at the Royal Academy in London. "Everywhere you go, you find ruins of buildings that have been demolished." "But everywhere there are materials, beautiful materials," he continued. "So I wanted to build this museum for the people who were originally living here so they can keep some memories."

The walls of the Ningbo History Museum feature a wide range of recycled bricks and tiles ? some of which date back over a thousand years.

Related story: Wang Shu wins Pritzker Prize 2012

The museum was constructed using a traditional technique called wapan, in which multiple elements of different sizes are packed together to create a stable structure.

"We worked together with craftsmen to work out how to use so many different kinds of...